The Ghosts of Erotica Past: How a Norwegian AI Startup Managed to Offend Absolutely Everyone at Cannes
In the grand tradition of tech entrepreneurs mistaking “we can do this” for “we should do this,” a Norwegian company called Multiformat has achieved the impressive feat of uniting the internet in collective revulsion. Their crime? Using artificial intelligence to resurrect—quite possibly literally—the stars of a 1976 erotic magazine and force them to perform in AI-generated short films with the punny title “Sh(AI)ved.” Because if there’s one thing the world needed, it was algorithmically generated smut with dad-joke branding.
The films premiered this week at Cannes, though notably *not* at the actual Cannes Film Festival, which presumably has standards. Instead, Multiformat and their Swedish distributor Cultpix managed to create a spectacle that has critics, feminists, and casual observers all asking the same question: Did nobody in the room raise a hand and suggest this might be a terrible idea?
The concept, such as it is, involves taking still photographs from a 1976 erotic magazine and using generative AI to animate them into moving images complete with sound and dialogue. It’s essentially deepfake porn for the deceased—or at least for people who haven’t been contacted in fifty years to ask if they’d like their younger selves digitally puppeteered into new sexual performances.
The backlash was as predictable as it was swift. Social media commentators were quick to point out the obvious ethical sinkhole: “Statistically at least a few of these models have passed on by now which basically means they’re using AI to reanimate the bodies/images of dead women to make nonconsensual porn of them,” noted one particularly incensed Bluesky user. Another X user cut to the chase: “Personally, I think using AI to simulate porn of people who didn’t consent to you is a vile, horrific crime!”
But fear not, dear reader, for Cultpix has a defense ready. According to CEO Rickard Gramfors, the whole thing is really about *stimulating discussion*. “We want to use the latest technology to stimulate a discussion about attitudes to images that are now half a century old,” he told Variety, presumably with a straight face. “What was once considered shocking ‘adult’ material now seems remarkably innocent by today’s standards.”
Ah yes, the classic “we’re just starting a conversation” defense, deployed here to justify turning static photos of real women into AI-generated pornography without their knowledge or consent. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.
The company’s social media team, apparently determined to make things worse, took to X to argue with critics directly. “It’s an experiment,” Cultpix tweeted, presumably while adjusting a lab coat. “We want to see what people think, positive and negative.” In a particularly illuminating follow-up, they clarified their ethical framework: “These were paid [performers] who consented to have their hanky panky recorded. We added motion and sound.”
There it is—the Silicon Valley special. Consent for a 1976 magazine photo shoot apparently equals consent for AI-generated video performances five decades later. It’s the same logic that brought us “if it’s on the internet, it’s free to use for training data” and “if you posted it, you consented to having it scraped.” The tech industry’s favorite loophole: temporal consent dilation. If they said yes once, surely that yes echoes through eternity, right?
The absurdity is compounded by Cultpix’s apparent belief that they were highlighting how *innocent* vintage erotica looks today. Yes, nothing says “look how quaint the past was” quite like using bleeding-edge technology to create nonconsensual sexual content from images of women who may very well be dead. How charming. How nostalgic.
Ironically, Cultpix operates out of Sweden—a country so aggressively anti-porn that it recently made purchasing custom OnlyFans content illegal, yet has been curiously slow to legislate against deepfake pornography. One might suspect they’re enjoying the publicity. As one industry observer noted, traffic to Cultpix.com must be “soaring” amid the controversy, and the company seems to be doubling down rather than backing down.
In what may be the most revealing moment of this entire saga, Cultpix’s official account posted what they apparently consider the ultimate metric of success: “Also, is it ‘fappable’? The ultimate test is whether people watch it on Cultpix. So far, nobody has written to say that they are cancelling their membership.”
There you have it, folks. The tech bro ethos distilled to its purest form: ethics are negotiable, consent is flexible, and the only question that matters is whether the content passes the “fappability test.” Welcome to the future of entertainment. Please leave your principles at the door.
